One Page desapeared from Google results over the weekend.

Has anyone had this happen? My page (just one page) is gone from the search results.

Not only did we lose our position in Google (we were #9) now the entire page is completely gone from Google index. However, It is on the first page of Bing and Yahoo. We did have our server down from Friday to Monday.

I went into Google webmaster tools on Monday and saw a big X next to sitemap. It said HTTP Error 404 detected on August 21, 2011. So Google went in on Sunday and came up with the error. But why only one page is missing and all the other pages still show up?

I was thinking that page was blacklisted by Google but when I went to Webmaster Tools to listen to "Requesting reconsideration of your site" video all they talk about is the "site" being blacklisted not a particular page.

4 Responses

404s are a normal part of internet life. When Google determines a page no longer exists on your site (404), it will remove the page from it's index.

But why only one page is missing and all the other pages still show up?

That is normal. Google does not crawl your entire site when it visits. It may crawl a single page. It depends whether they are following a link from another site to your site, or if the crawler is making a visit to crawl your site. Even if the crawler is visiting to crawl your site, only a small percentage of your site is normally captured on any single crawl.

If your site is operating normally now, you can expect your pages to re-appear in SERPs over the course of the next 30 days. The amount of time it will take depends upon your site's DA. The basic question is how important your site is to Google. SEOmoz is considered important so pages appear within a couple hours. Other sites are less important and pages may take several weeks to appear.

The "notification" process for Google is to submit a site map. If you haven't done so already, submit an updated sitemap.

The only other thing that would help is building links to your missing page from authoritative sites.

I know you are frustrated and want this issue resolved immediately. This issue is why it is critical to have 99.99% server uptime, and for more money you can achieve 100% server uptime. Your site outage is the root issue. The missing page is merely a symptom.